@name

The @name tag assigns an alternate name to a procedural (non-class) page or a global variable, so that documentation tooling and other tags can refer to it by that alias rather than by its actual, often awkward, identifier. It is mainly useful for old-style procedural PHP code written before namespaces and classes were the norm, where two files might otherwise define identically-named globals or functions that generated documentation would struggle to tell apart.

"@name" <Name> [ <Description> ]

Parsing a @name tag produces a NameTag instance exposing $alias, the name assigned to the element, as a string.

final class NameTag extends Tag
{
    public function __construct(
        string $name,
        public readonly string $alias,
        ?DescriptionInterface $description = null,
    ) {
        parent::__construct($name, $description);
    }
}

@name is part of the original phpDocumentor tag vocabulary, but phpDocumentor 3 has since dropped it entirely: it is absent from the current tag reference index, and no tags/name.html page exists any longer. Only the archived phpDocumentor 1.x manual still describes it, as a legacy reference rather than current documentation — phpDocumentor 1.x manual, archived. It is parsed here only for compatibility with classic-style docblocks.

05 July 2026